Summary

As you learned in this chapter, the ASP.NET configuration system does not rely upon the IIS metabase as ASP did. Instead, ASP.NET uses an XML configuration system. An XML configuration system is human- readable/writable, replicates easily, and does not require local server access, since you can simply FTP the configuration files to your web servers.

ASP.NET's XML configuration system is divided into two distinct files:

• machine.config .

• web.config .

A server always has machine.config file to represent the default settings for all web applications on that server. However, that same server may have multiple web.config files used to configure applications on an applicationbyapplication basis.

You also learned that configuration files are inherited. The default settings in machine.config are inherited in web.config files unless overridden, as you saw in the <sessionState> examples within this chapter.

After introducing configuration, we then spent the bulk of the chapter discussing various configuration settings used in ASP.NET. We covered topics from internationalization, to HTTP Handlers, to process model settings. The settings covered in this chapter cover 90 percent of all the configuration settings you will want to use for applications.

Finally, we discussed how you could author your own configuration section handler by implementing a class that inherited from the IConfigurationSectionHandler interface.